To add my voice to the chorus: Nginx, hands down. It's a great piece of software - simple enough to configure, small and efficient, and it just works and keeps

To add my voice to the chorus: Nginx, hands down. It's a great piece of software - simple enough to configure, small and efficient, and it just works and keeps working. I have literally never seen it crash or do anything it wasn't supposed to do. As for lighttpd, I messed with it a while ago and while it has its advocates, I found it fiddly to install and configure and quite old-fashioned. The arrival of nginx means you don't really need to consider lighttpd, IMO, it's kind of the older, worse version of the same thing. However ... Your other option is of course just sticking with Apache. I don't know the details of your server (maybe should have said?) but it doesn't use that much memory! For many common scenarios using it could be quite a bit easier. Well, it would likely be no work at all actually, since it's probably already installed and running fine. There can be a tendency to over-optimise up front; why not take the path of least resistance, get something up and running with Apache first, then switch if and when you need to? Just a thought ;)